Nobody, it is said, likes scripted politicians. Those blatantly self-serving, risk-averse hucksters and panderers. Such calculation. Such orchestration. Such focus groups.
Such is politics.
But there’s a reason why they keep doing it. That’s because going off-the-cuff blunt is only effectively attention-getting and viscerally appealing–until it no longer is. Sooner or later you sound like the loudest guy in the bar. Still shouting well past last call to departing drunks.
And that’s not the image enough of us–as ideological, idealistic, deluded, dumb, informed, angry as we can be as an eclectic electorate–want in a president of the United States.
This is what Donald Trump will discover before the year–hell, maybe before the first debate–is over. Americans like candid. Americans like straight talking. Americans like authentic. And enough of them seemingly like a billionaire with a trillionaire’s swagger, and plenty likely yearn for the ultimate celebrity CEO. But Americans don’t like being on the wrong end of an insult.
So far in this pre-first debate campaign, Trump has managed to alienate two groups: non-Cuban Hispanics, and that’s most of them, and anybody with a soft spot for those in military uniform, and that’s most Americans. And he doesn’t apologize, of course, because he’s never wrong and, besides, that would be a sign of weakness. And America, which used to be great, cannot afford any more weak presidents.
Had Trump, during his porous-border rant, merely noted sarcastically that Mexico was not, say, always sending their “best and brightest” to us, it would not have become a hot-button issue. Merely an ethnic cheap-shot, disguised as ad hoc humor, that would have been lost amid the paranoid, immigration prattle of his fellow GOP candidates. But “some of them are rapists” and “some are good people” only outed him.
As to John McCain being a “captured”-war hero oxymoron, Trump just self-littered his campaign with a rhetorical land mine. If he really wanted to call out McCain, and he really had the guts, he would have put him in his proper Vietnam context.
Who exactly was McCain bombing that he would be brought down over a lake near civilian populations? Was the Navy pilot a “my country, right or wrong” bomber who still thinks Vietnam was a good idea? Did he have the best, “heroic” interests of the U.S. in mind by trying to impose Sarah Palin on us as vice president?
There are a lot of ways a flawed candidate could be handling this if he weren’t Donald Trump. What’s he to do? Take advice from some consultants who couldn’t make the “Celebrity Apprentice” cut?
Regardless, keep Aug. 6 circled for the first installment of “Billionaire Apprentice Candidate.”